Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting
National Gallery

What are you searching for when you look at a painting? This is a show to make you wonder again. Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting is a small exhibition that brings together a few works on paper and a handful of paintings by an artist who, though not widely familiar, has over the course of a long career earned the quiet respect and implicit trust of his many aficionados. Leon Kossoff has just turned 80, but throughout a postwar era of constantly shifting cultural fashions he has stood fast by his vision, an unwavering seeker of what he senses to be a truth.

Kossoff has been visiting the National Gallery since the early 1950s. He has stood awestruck and marvelling before the works of the Old Masters. Rembrandt and Rubens, Poussin and Cézanne have never ceased to amaze him.

And he has moved closer to them through drawing from their masterworks: making sketches and etchings there in the gallery as if he were working from a life model or real landscape. The images speak of a steadily deepening familiarity — and one that only opens the eyes wider to an unfathomable mystery.

The works on show have been chosen from the hundreds of dog-eared and dusty sheaves that have piled up over the decades in Kossoff’s studio. They were done purely for his own pleasure and education. And if you are expecting punctiliously executed studies you will be disappointed. Kossoff is not copying, he is responding. Slashing and scribbling, scratching and smudging, he translates the luminous clarity of Poussin, for instance, into an impetuous charcoal mess. Or at least that’s what it might appear to be at first. But look again.

As you watch his eye moving feverishly about the surface, you sense him constantly searching for some fundamental essence, seeking out that moment of still-living invention that lies at the heart of a painting and lends it a perpetual sense of power.

He may discover this in line, as when he distils a Degas painting into a few flowing strokes. Poussin may be famed as a rigorous classicist but Kossoff enters into the carnal spirit of his bacchanalia as he renders his Triumph of Pan with an almost Rubenesque glee.

These drawings are less about the image than an experience of that image. Returning to the same canvases again and again (sometimes — as in the case of a Rembrandt crucifixion — with as much as 40 years between sketches), he feels his way.

His sketches are not about the finished product. They are about the search. And for the visitor their fundamental value is that they might inspire him to set out on his own quest.

Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting is at the National Gallery, WC2 (020-7747 2885), until July 1

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